To Remember
by SomeKindofAuthor
Summary: Nudge’s reaction to the Vietnam Memorial was so strong that Max made a mental note to talk about it later. Now is later, and their chat brings up issues bigger than just a field trip. missing piece from SoF
1. Chapter 1

To Remember

Summary: Nudge's reaction to the Vietnam Memorial was so strong that Max made a mental note to talk about it later. Now is later, and their chat brings up issues bigger than just a field trip.

**A/N: ****Sort of a companion piece to A Midnight Chat, because they deal with the same theme of the unrecognized mutant community.**** I'd like to thank the reviewer who asked me to write this, "areader". Be forewarned: I don't do Max a lot, so she may be OOC. Sorry in advance. I do not own any of these characters or the Vietnam Memorial. **

**To Remember**

"Knock, knock."

Nudge looked up from her school work, and her eyes widened when she saw me at her window. My legs dangled inside the room, swinging back and forth. I leaned one hand on the windowsill, and with the other beckoned my little sister to join me outside, away from the small room that reeked of normality.

"Max! Why are you outside my window? Is it time to leave? Have you found something in the code? Are we under attack? Did Iggy—"

I laughed. "Shh! C'mon, before somebody else wakes up. We're going to take a flight tonight."

Nudge grinned and practically shoved her text book across the room.

I completely understood. Fiddling with numbers and letters, trying to make sense of something no one over the age of mandatory school attendance understood? Or dancing on clouds, letting the wind be my guide?

Nudge grabbed her jacket from her closet and sprinted to the window.

She'd gotten good at leaping suddenly into the air for her flight, and though I preferred the running start, tonight wasn't about me. I went first and hovered next to the house. We were far enough away from a big city so that when Nudge jumped from the window, moonlight revealed joy on her face . She let herself fall for a few seconds, before spreading her tawny wings and rising back to my level.

She giggled, and my heart soared, grateful for the fact that she seemed okay.

But I have learned in my life as a paranoid schizophrenic that assumptions usually led to really bad consequences, so I didn't take Nudge's all-right-ness at face value.

"So where are we headed?"

I shrugged. "Nowhere. Anywhere." Nudge's feathers moved slightly causing her to dip and swerve. "As long as it's somewhere not too suspicious for a couple of kids to be. We _are_ pretending to be normal, now, we must follow their rules. Like the whole curfew thing?" Nudge turned to me and stuck her tongue out. "I second that 'Yuck'!" I exclaimed. I flew up next to her, as close as I could get. The tips of our wings brushed, and we were silent for a moment.

"Let's not go anywhere," Nudge said, kind of quietly by her standards. "Let's just fly."

I had no problem with that. We flew for what a clock would have said twenty minutes, but I would have claimed a couple of hours. I could have blamed that on my innate impatience, but it seemed to me that the time slot was burdened with so many things that Nudge wanted to say, but held back.

Our wings got tired, so we landed on the limb of a huge tree. Once we'd settled comfortable and retracted our wings, I tried to pull the plug on whatever was keeping Nudge back.

"So. The Wall really hit you hard today, huh?"

Nudge curled herself up into a mutant-bird-kid ball, drawing her knees to her chest.

"Oh. Yeah. My friends were really nice, though. They didn't tease me about it, even when I had to sit by myself for a while and try to recover. They just, like, let me take a breather."

"You okay, now?" I asked. I ran my fingers along the coarse bark. "Anything you want to talk about?"

Nudge lifted her head from her shell with a weary smile. "I'm fine, Max."

_Right, cause you sound absolutely peachy._

"I just wish that someone else could… could _feel_ this." She started to unfurl. Her legs dangled from the branch, pumping back and forth. "Not because, like, I want to get rid of it. I just want to share it." She looked to me, and her brown eyes had such an impact that I skipped a breath. "Cause it's big."

I scooted next to Nudge and placed an arm around her. "Okay, Nudge. Share it with me."

Nudge leaned into me. She took a shaky breath, and reached for my hand.

"I can feel it again, and it's still real strong," she said, inhaling deeply again. "Too many names. So many stories. I can still feel families. There's pride and anger and sadness, so many emotions that I can't even sift through wives and brothers and sisters or soldiers, walking up to the wall." Her voice rose higher and louder getting more excited with each syllable. "And it's like I'm walking with them to, for the first time, read his name. Half these tears are mine, Max, but half of them are _theirs_, and it was hard to figure out which cries were the voices of families who were broken because of the war, and which were me, crying because of the emotion and injustice of it all! We have to _stop_ it, Max!"

She sounded so desperate to _do_ something that I thought she was going to launch from the tree and hunt down each individual wrong in the world to try to make right. That was too big a job for a birdkid who hadn't even hit puberty yet. Not even I, supposed savior of the world, could attempt such a daunting task with anything like hope.

"We're trying, Nudge," I assured her. "We're doing our part, everything we can." I rubbed her shoulder, hoping that my words and that small action would help her at least some.

"So many names, Max. _People._ I don't think, I mean, some of my friends looked at the wall and were, like, 'Okay, we're done' and skipped to the gift shop, but I couldn't skip. I could barely stand because all those names were _people_ to me. Not just soldiers, but family. Through other's memories, I _loved_ them. And I can't stand that they're dead. So many dead."

She shook underneath me, and I tried to imagine the conflict. Cursed with her usual Nudge sensitivity to others and her power amplifying that times thousands.

My mind went blank, cutting off any words of wisdom that my job as leader was supposed to supply. I could only rock her back and forth, pulling her closer and closer to me, murmuring empty assurances.

_It's okay, Nudge, it's okay. _

It could never be okay.

Fresh pain. The force of emotions was so strong that Nudge wasn't only affected by mere _echoes_. The strain in her voice revealed fresh pain.

"Why did this happen, Max?"

_All that testosterone in the White House,_ I thought involuntarily. _A woman—_no, a decent human being would have looked at the damage and the numbers steadily rising and concluded that it wasn't necessary. But how could I tell Nudge that the deaths she sobbed so heavily for were unnecessary? Bad people do bad things. But the names on the wall shot down people, too. They weren't bad. They were following orders…Tthey were soldiers. They were trying to survive.

Like us. We survive. Tally the number of Erasers that we've killed. They're soldiers on the opposing side. We say they're the bad side, but if they're the bad side, why did they fight so hard to keep us from winning? Cause we're the good side. But if we're the good side, how could we slaughter their soldiers without conscience?

"_You killed your own brother!"_

You can't think about these things in war.

I'm Max. See my cape fluttering in the wind? I'm Superman.

But I'd make a horrible soldier. I know that for sure. I could never work as a unit, for one, unless that unit is my Flock. I could never fight for a cause—unless that cause is survival. I could never lose myself in battle because I have five butts to think about besides my own.

Except, maybe I'd be a good soldier. Give me a field of baddies and my Flock on the other side? Those villains are toast.

Those villains are toast = more names for their wall.

But a good soldier can't think about that.

"There's too much injustice in the world," I said. Then I regretted spilling my own worries on Nudge who was already racked with hundreds of worries, the majority of which weren't even her own.

"Wars…" she whispered.

"Poverty. Prejudice," I added. _Shut up, Max, she doesn't need this right now._"Unequal access. Ignorance."

"Us."

Nudge didn't need me. She leaped onto my train of thought by herself. She squeezed my hand, and I relaxed muscles I didn't know I was holding in tension. I let out a deep breath, quietly, still trying to put on the façade that I was all-powerful so that Nudge could lean on me.

"_We_ need a wall."

Nudge wasn't selfish; there was something in the tone of her voice that made "We" encompass so much more than just the Flock. Always thinking bigger than herself, this time Nudge meant the injustice inflicted on "Us" to include all who the scientists tinkered with and stripped of their lives.

"When Gazzy and I are in the White House, I'll make the Mutant Remembrance Wall, or something that'll stand like the Vietnam Memorial. Too many names on this one, too. And whitecoats would come because they would be the only ones who ever knew what it meant. They would come to tear it down, but when they'd get near it, the stone would be made of the same mirror stuff as the other wall and they'd see themselves. I don't think, Max, that they've ever really looked at themselves and seen what kind of people they are because if they had, they wouldn't have the heart to do the kind of things they do. But at Our Wall, they'll look in the mirror and…" Nudge suddenly stopped. "Sorry, Max," she said, looking abashed. "That sounds stupid."

I shook my head and ran my hand through her wild curls. "Not stupid. I wish the whitecoats had hearts, too. And your wall's a great idea."

Because we're in a war, too.

I forget a lot that we're not the only soldiers on our side. It's hard to remember that there's not just the six of us against the world. But there's my Flock, and then there's every other experiment who lived if only for that first day, or who expired after a few years, or who was terminated, considered too dangerous, uncontrollable.

They didn't win, but who's to say they didn't _fight_? Their _existence_ was a battlefield, every _breath_ was like hand-to-hand combat.

Too many names. Too many un-named. So many soldiers fighting our war who fell at the hands of dispassionate scientists.

Our fallen deserved to be remembered.

We sat there for more moments that seemed out of place in time until I noticed a red haze on the horizon. I hated to break this moment, but Anne would have a cow and a half if we weren't in our beds by dawn.

"We have to go back now."

I looked over to Nudge who was staring off into space. She wiped tears from her eyes, but her gaze never wavered from the distance. What was she looking at? Something I couldn't see. Something bigger than the Flock.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary: Nudge's reaction to the Vietnam Memorial was so strong that Max made a mental note to talk about it later. Now is later, and their chat brings up issues bigger than just a field trip.**

_(Sometime after Book 3)_

Nudge tapped Max on the shoulder and fished a folded piece of paper from her pocket. Nudge unfolded the paper, Max squinted, and her memory went fuzzy for a moment before coming into focus. She placed an arm around Nudge's shoulder and made excuses to Dr. Martinez. Nudge tapped Iggy's hand twice, and then laced her fingers into his. The three bird kids varied from the pack.

"Where are you going?" Fang appeared next to Max and she resisted the urge to jump out of her skin. She looked to Nudge for further instruction. Nudge was the leader in this.

"They should all come," Nudge said after thinking about it. She nodded, the look of a firm decision on her face. "Gazzy and Angel and Total should be there, too."

"Be where?" Gazzy asked from behind Fang. Angel trailed him with Total trotting next to her. Gazzy asked again. "Be where?"

Nudge thought. "I haven't decided on a name for it, yet. Nothing sounds right."

So Gazzy shrugged and followed his Flock with Nudge at the front. The group was silent, this, too, was following Nudge's initiative. It seemed wrong to talk when Nudge's lips were closed with a morose kind of seriousness. Finally, they arrived.

"Uh, Nudge?" Gazzy said. "This is the Vietnam Memorial."

Nudge both nodded and shrugged leaving the Gasman hopelessly confused. Max smiled a little, Iggy wore a knowingly somber look, and Angel could read Nudge's mind so they all knew what was going on. Fang was the only other clueless birdkid, but he seemed fine with that, willing to wait to see what was going to happen next.

The Gasman would wait, too, because it seemed like Nudge was going to be cryptic today.

Nudge didn't mean to be. She just didn't have the right words today. Other days, the right words didn't matter, but today, at least in their small bubble, all talk carried weight.

Nudge led the group past the majority of the people that hung around the Memorial. Some walked the perimeter, reading the names, or looking at the items people left, and some were fixed to one particular station, one particular name. Nudge bypassed all of these visitors before finally stopping in a place where the crowd was scarce.

She squatted down near the wall, and dug in her pocket for another object. A mirror. She placed the paper on the ground, smoothing out the creases, and then weighted it down with the mirror.

The Gasman leaned forward to read the scrawl on the paper.

"Ari Batchelder," he read to himself. "Max II. Kid-with-scales. What…?"

"They're names," Nudge said, standing back up to take her place between Max and Iggy. She grasped their hands and squeezed. "Kind of. All the experiments that Max, Iggy and I can remember, names, or just descriptions. To remember them by."

Gazzy looked from the Vietnam Memorial to the Mutant Memorial that sat at Nudge's feet.

"It seems wrong that they're going to take it up and put it in storage," Max said. "It'll only stay for a day."

Nudge didn't seem to mind. "It's not the real memorial, not yet because we don't have all the names. It's more like a promise." Nudge mused over these words before smiling, deciding that she liked the sound of them." A promise to come back and give the un-named a name and the un-loved love and the experiments who lived and died in the labs a chance to finally rest. A promise to remember.

"I promise to remember."


End file.
